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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: understanding money
Message-ID: <1091@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Jan-86 23:49:57 EST
Article-I.D.: mmintl.1091
Posted: Mon Jan 27 23:49:57 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 10:48:39 EST
References: <1038@mmintl.UUCP> <324@frog.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 39

In article <324@frog.UUCP> tdh@frog.UUCP (T. Dave Hudson) writes:
>> The problem is that understanding money as a medium of exchange is
>> insufficient to understand what money is -- the point is not that the
>> goods one can exchange have a monetary value, but that they have an
>> intrinsic value.  Since money has no intrinsic value, money buying
>> money gives no understanding of money.
>
>There is no such thing as intrinsic value.  But if you mean
>use-value, the uses to which a good may be put for obtaining
>further values, even paper money has that.  (Remember the
>joke beginning by asking for toilet paper and ending up
>asking for change for a ten?)  It just doesn't have uses as
>normally valuable as, say, those of gold or silver.

A point well taken.  But there is another form of money: money in the
form of electronically encoded information -- your bank balance, for
example.  This is money in pure form, and it has *no* intrinsic value.
(And what I mean by intrinsic value is what you prefer to call use-value.)

>Money, which is simply a common medium of exchange, is not a
>measure of value.  It is used as a measure because
>calculation is easy and because the expectations of future
>trade that are based on past trade are fairly reliable.

If money is used as a measure of value, it is a measure of value.  What
else would it mean for something to be a measure of value?

>To fully understand money, you must understand the basics of
>exchange.  To say that understanding exchange gives no
>understanding of money is to say that understanding money
>gives no understanding of money.  (And the implicit is even
>more eloquent.)

The claim is that understanding the exchange of money solely for other
money does not give an understanding of money.  You are attacking a
strawman.

Frank Adams                           ihpn4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Multimate International    52 Oakland Ave North    E. Hartford, CT 06108